Aerial view of America

When I served my time on the cultural amuse-bouche that was television's The Word, one of the many bottom-feeder highlights was my interview with porn star hall-of-famer Janine Lindemulder. Although the copy of her award-winning film Hidden Obsessions (Best Girl-Girl Scene, 1993 X-rated Critics' Association) was constantly "in use" at the Word office due to "research needs", I managed to glean that Janine's porn persona was one of ripe-for-corruption innocence and that her golden rule was that she would only have on-screen sex with other women.

I interviewed the predictably blonde'n'buxom Janine on the set of her latest lez-fest (where our camera crew was suddenly happy to put in extra unpaid hours to shoot unasked-for B-roll), and learned that Janine sometimes got so excited during a scene that when the director yelled "Cut!", she had to nip back to the dressing room so that a colleague could "finish her off". Maybe she was telling the truth, but one thing the canny Ms Lindemulder knew was that the public loves a porn star who acts like a porn star.

And even if you're not a porn star, they're happy for you to act like one anyway, as evidenced by the media clout garnered by Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson after their accidental vaginal close-ups. If acting like a porn star isn't in your bag of tricks, at least try to sound like one by affecting a sultry Scarlett Johansson purr. In a city always on top of a trend, LA's prevailing "gag me with a spoon" sing-song Valley Girl accent made famous by the Moon Unit Zappa hit has now morphed into an arid stab at porn star huskiness. Attempting a raspy, insinuating delivery, Hollywood homegirls push air through constipated voice boxes resulting only in a metallic croak with all the allure of a throat cancer victim talking through her neck-hole.

That the porn aesthetic dominates pop culture is confirmed by the hoards of endearingly slutty, bleached blonde, cancer-croak ingenues who are the common currency of reality shows. With varying degrees of success, the women of Rock Star: Supernova and The Bachelor strain for the classy je ne sais quoi of the sex worker. As witness to the increasing pornification of the nation, I have only one question: how do I get that great porn star hair?

For artfully bed-tousled tresses, I need look no further than the barely-legal fembots who star in The Hills, the spawn of MTV's hit Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. The chick reality version of Entourage, The Hills dilly-dallies through the ADD days of Fembots 1, 2, 3 and 4 who do cool Hollywood scenester jobs like interning at Teen Vogue and working the door at feel-my-heat clubs. The four girls are uniformly pretty as a pin-up, and in acknowledgment of their generic interchangeability, the show's producers have thoughtfully provided name captions every single time one of them re-appears on the screen.

The lighting is music-video perfect, the dialogue teen-drama pulpy, but in interviews the stars insist they aren't scripted, because they "aren't good enough actors". I sort of believe them, given that teenagers are naturally narcissistic enough to think their lives are worthy of being followed around by a camera. But for a bunch of reality participants who are supposedly not acting, they sure can overact: "Hey America! These are my emotions! Here I am crying! Wahhhh! Hey! I'm happy again! Yaaaay!" Every now and again, a whimpery-voiced emo guy or sob-throated folk lady will ooze over the soundtrack to underscore the bathos. But although I came to sneer, I stayed to cheer.

As the series has progressed, the Fembots' boyfriends have been revealed as pouty little bitches crippled by raging insecurity, sulking whenever their girlfriends get attention from another guy or actually have to leave their side to go to work. In a satisfying flip of the usual clingy, irrationally-jealous girlfriend stereotype, here it's the menfolk who whine and manipulate while the Fembots generally register mild bemusement and continue about their business. Like Janine Lindemulder's ladies-first movies, it turns out The Hills is a girls-only game.